As I take a peek outside my home office window, there’s currently no snow in Montréal, but those of us who live in this part of the world know this will likely not be the case for much longer. It’s been a relatively mild autumn so far, but with winter on the horizon, I’m having a hard time figuring out how warmly to dress. It’s not quite fall anymore, but it’s also not yet officially winter. We’re existing in a strange in-between zone.
As I take a peek outside my home office window, there’s currently no snow in Montréal, but those of us who live in this part of the world know this will likely not be the case for much longer. It’s been a relatively mild autumn so far, but with winter on the horizon, I’m having a hard time figuring out how warmly to dress. It’s not quite fall anymore, but it’s also not yet officially winter. We’re existing in a strange in-between zone.
Read MoreAs part of this year’s Fresh Pages Initiative, Mahta Riazi was named the 2022 Fresh Pages Guest Editor. This temporary, part-time paid opportunity was designed to help an aspiring literary artist who is Indigenous, Black, or a person of colour, develop skills in curating and editing a literary magazine.
Read MoreBy bailey macabre
bailey macabre is an agender nêhiyaw/michif/Ukrainian self-taught interdisciplinary artist and writer residing on the homelands of the Snuneymuxw on so-called Vancouver Island, with matrilineal ties to Beardys & Okemasis Cree Nation. Their practice includes a variety of mediums from comics and digital art to painting, sculpture, beadwork, and zines.
Read MoreBy Oreganillo.
Aodh Ó Riagáin is Oreganillo., an Irish, genderqueer, dyspraxic cartoonist working in the arcane tradition of slinging ink onto paper with a pen and a brush.
Read MoreBy Véronique Darwin
She said Valentine’s Day was a weight off her shoulders. She said people said she had a nice ass. She said, “Who should I like now?” She asked questions of herself like this. She said, “I am wheezing and I just poked a pimple.” She’s so silly, but she knows she’s silly. She’s talking to herself. She’s writing for posterity. It’s so odd! Why did she not stretch out of herself a little, then, if she knew time would be going on as it was, but longer, and longer, forever even? Why couldn’t she just take a second to go away? Couldn’t she have left a diary sitting somewhere and gone and done something, for a while?
Read MoreBy Erin Soros
No window, no lamp for reading—you cannot read. No clock. The one light in the ceiling is inescapable. You face it every time you open your eyes because you are lying on a bed, your limbs tied.
Look at that light, fixed and stark in the ceiling, an unblinking eye. You are in an interrogation room with no one to interrogate you.
Read MoreBy Julian Button-Nadon
“Gramps, why does the sea sing to me?”
Dry the socks, always dry the socks—never wear a wet pair too long else they’ll cut yer foot off, or worse the fish’ll get in—squirmin slidin intah yer bones. Eat yer food fast else you’ll not get tah finish, never talk back tah the ribbons else you’ll be the first tah keep night watch. The sea’s loudest at night—DON’T LISTEN.
Read MoreBy Zoe Lubetkin
Early, before the gas station gets its noon delivery of sugar slush flavoring and the liquor store manager changes shifts with the guy who doesn’t card, Ella and I park in the lot. We sit in her brother’s car before the bright metal gets too hot and eat cherries for breakfast.
Read MoreBy Marissa Higgins
We played the game only four months before D died. Telling my family was fine, cold; I called my mother, who put me on speaker phone so my father could hear, and explained I couldn’t give them money for winter oil in person on account of going to a funeral.
Read MoreBy Katharina Mohr
Let me hide your body between words, cut you with commas, question your existence in marks. I’ll cut you from my history, so your bones echo a memory and your body is a blade whose fibres I’ll chop. This is a farewell letter.
Read MoreBy Alexei Perry Cox
Ibrahim was extremely lucky. The explosion killed everybody on the bus, the driver, the passengers, everybody except him. His good fortune must have been due to the fact that he was standing by the rear door intending to get off in a few minutes’ time, and the bomb (if it was a bomb, rather than something else, something even more improbable) was at the front of the bus.
Read MoreBy Tremain Xenos
I wish I had a way to begin that might provide some hint as to what would become of me and Joshua. The truth is I can’t recall when the prickly numbness first crept down my jaw to place me on a tandem with the man I might have been. I close my eyes and climb unscalable accretions of remembrance to grope in vain for impressions still endowed with sentiment. I open them and Joshua still lies on the sofa among the mould and plastic bags and rats to colonize our squalor. I crave nothing but the needle, the return to the womb, the obliteration of chronology. And yet—somewhere in my memory—there sits a snapshot of our childhood on the knoll.
Read MoreBy Deborah Zafer
Body asked to speak to me.
“The thing is,” it said, leaning back in Chair, “you used to be unkind, but now you keep talking about how wonderful I am and how everyone should love their Body.”
Read MoreBy Abu Bakr Sadiq
in the wakefulness of my hunger for luminescence
i rifle through cities for lighthouses
By Dax Carswell
Breathe in, / Breathe out. Catalyze the / Cries. Don’t wait too long to / Tear up—space them evenly,
Read MoreBy Domenica Martinello
I lock fingers with myself, preteen. I offer up the underwire. I bounce and supple, drag and drop the pretense, steal. My fanny pack is plum, I smell all pungent and powdery. I return to puppy shampoo, milk and strawberries.
Read MoreBy Laura Mota
the cows are benevolent and full of flies. / wilderness needs to make its case against nature romanticization. / I tell the cows that my partner’s kisses taste like quick disapprovals.
Read MoreBy Sneha Subramanian Kanta
The calculus of things: / petrichor lungs of forests / We walk till the last post office of a country / though we know
Read More
